Tag: small business

In this series I have written about the planning that gets skipped at the start, and the accountability that drifts once a project is underway. This time I want to focus on the end, or rather, what happens when a project does not quite get there, and what is lost when it does not.

The statistics are stark

The data on project outcomes is not reassuring. Research by the Project Management Institute found that only around 29% of projects are completed on time and within budget. The Standish CHAOS Report, which has tracked project outcomes for decades, consistently finds that fewer than a third of projects are considered fully successful.

A separate PwC study of more than 10,000 projects found that only 2.5% of organisations complete all of their projects successfully.

These figures are drawn largely from larger organisations with dedicated project management capability. The picture in smaller businesses, where projects tend to be less formally managed, is unlikely to be more encouraging.

Most projects, in most organisations, do not fully deliver what they set out to do.

Why projects stall in the final stretch

The halfway point of a project is where the energy peaks. The initial excitement is still present, some progress is visible, and the end feels close enough to motivate.

But the final third is harder. The interesting, creative work is largely done. What remains is often the detailed, painstaking work of implementation: testing, training, communication, process embedding, and the thousand small tasks that turn a project output into something the business can actually use.

This is also the point at which the business, having waited patiently for the project to deliver, starts to expect results. Pressure builds. People who have been borrowed from their day jobs want to return to them. Sponsors who have been funding the work want to see a return.

And so, more often than not, the project is declared done before it is finished. A system goes live without proper training. A new process is documented but not embedded. A change is announced but not followed through.

Finishing is not the same as succeeding

This is the distinction that project management theory calls benefits realisation, and it is the phase that most organisations handle least well.

A project is not successful because it was delivered on time and within budget. It is successful because the change it was designed to create actually happened, and the business is genuinely better as a result.

If a new CRM system goes live but the sales team does not adopt it, the project has not succeeded. If a new process is designed but not followed, the project has not succeeded. If a restructure is completed on paper but the working patterns and relationships do not change, the project has not succeeded.

Benefits realisation is the work of making sure the change actually lands. It is unglamorous, it is slow, and it requires sustained attention after the moment of launch when everyone’s focus has already moved on. Which is precisely why it so often does not happen.

Why this matters more in growing businesses

In a large organisation, a project team might stay in place for months after go-live to support adoption, manage issues, and track whether the intended benefits are being realised. There are often formal review points, benefit tracking mechanisms, and governance structures that persist beyond delivery.

In a growing business, the project team is usually the senior leadership team, plus whoever else could be spared. When the project is declared done, everyone returns to their day jobs immediately. The headspace that was devoted to the project disappears almost overnight.

And so the final 10% of the work, the embedding, the adoption, the measurement, gets quietly abandoned. The project is considered finished. The benefits are assumed rather than tracked. And six months later, when someone asks whether things have changed, the honest answer is: not as much as we expected.

Asking the question at the start

The most effective way to improve benefits realisation is to define what it looks like before the project begins.

What does success look like, specifically, 90 days after go-live? What behaviours will have changed? What metrics will have moved? Who is responsible for tracking that, and what happens if it is not happening?

These questions are uncomfortable to answer before the project has started, because the honest answer is often: we do not know yet. But the act of asking them forces a clarity about purpose that makes everything that follows more deliberate.

A project with a clear definition of the change it is trying to create is more likely to get to the end. And a project team that knows it will be asked to demonstrate benefits is more likely to plan for the work of realising them.

The question worth asking

Before the next project begins, it is worth asking a simple question: if we get to the end and declare this done, how will we know whether it actually worked?

If the answer is uncertain, that uncertainty is worth resolving before the project starts, not after it finishes.

The cost of a project that delivers without landing is not just the budget and the time. It is the opportunity cost of change that did not happen, and the organisational fatigue of going through the process of change without receiving its benefits.

That is an expensive outcome. And in most cases, it is a preventable one.

If you are planning a project and want to think through how you will know whether it has truly succeeded, or if you are partway through one and wondering whether the benefits are being properly tracked, I am always happy to have that conversation.

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support, from planning and coordination to delivery and benefits tracking.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

This series has explored why projects stall before they start, when planning gets skipped in the rush to act. But even when a project is well-planned, there is another failure mode that is just as common, and just as avoidable. It is the question of who, exactly, is responsible for making it happen.

The accountability assumption

In a small team, a lot goes unsaid. That is often a genuine strength. Growing businesses move quickly precisely because there is less bureaucracy, fewer sign-offs, and a higher degree of mutual trust and understanding between the people involved.

But that same informality creates a particular kind of risk in project work. When responsibilities are assumed rather than agreed, when everyone believes someone else has picked up a task, and when the shared understanding of priorities turns out not to be shared at all, projects begin to drift. And often nobody notices until the drift has become a delay.

This is not a problem that only affects large organisations with complex hierarchies. In many respects it is more acute in smaller businesses, precisely because there are fewer people, roles are less defined, and the assumption of alignment runs deeper.

We’re a small team, we know what we’re doing

One of the most common things I hear at the start of a project in a growing business is some version of: we do not need a lot of process, we all know each other, we communicate well.

And it is usually true, as a general description of how the business operates day to day.

But a project is not day-to-day operations. It is a temporary, specific piece of work with its own timeline, its own dependencies, and its own demands on people who are already busy doing other things. The informal communication that keeps the business running smoothly is not the same as the structured accountability that keeps a project on track.

When those two things get confused, the results are predictable. Tasks sit in the gap between people, each assuming the other has picked them up. Decisions that need to be made wait for a conversation that never quite happens. Priorities shift without the project team being told, because nobody formally owns the communication.

The priority problem

There is a related assumption that is equally dangerous: that everyone involved in a project has the same view of how important it is, relative to everything else they are doing.

In a growing business, most people are operating at or near full capacity. When a project is added to someone’s existing responsibilities, it competes with work that has immediate, visible consequences if it is not done. The project, by contrast, has a deadline that feels further away, and consequences that are less immediate.

Without an explicit conversation about priority, and without someone actively managing the project’s claim on people’s time, the project tends to lose that competition. Not because anyone decides to deprioritise it, but because the day-to-day always feels more urgent.

This is how projects that everyone supports in principle end up being the thing that everyone is too busy to move forward in practice.

The cost of assumed alignment

The damage done by unclear accountability is often invisible at first. The project appears to be moving. People are attending meetings, tasks are being discussed, progress is being reported.

But underneath the surface, the gaps are accumulating. Actions from the last meeting have not been completed. A decision that was discussed has not actually been made. A dependency that was flagged has not been resolved.

By the time this becomes visible, the project is weeks or months behind, and the effort required to recover is significantly greater than the effort that would have been needed to prevent it.

What clear accountability actually looks like

Clarity on accountability does not require a formal project management framework or a dedicated project manager. But it does require a few deliberate habits that smaller businesses often skip in the interest of moving quickly.

It means agreeing, explicitly, who owns each workstream, and what that ownership means in practice. It means documenting decisions and actions, not to create bureaucracy, but because undocumented decisions tend to be unmade decisions. It means having a regular, structured touchpoint where progress is reviewed against commitments, not just discussed informally.

And it means someone taking responsibility for the project as a whole, not just their piece of it. In corporate settings that is the project manager’s role. In growing businesses it can be anyone, but it needs to be someone.

The value of an outside pair of eyes

One of the things external support does particularly well in project work is providing the neutral accountability that internal teams find difficult to sustain.

When everyone involved in a project is also running the business, it is genuinely hard to hold each other to account without it feeling personal. An external coordinator does not carry those dynamics. They can ask directly whether an action was completed, whether a decision has been made, whether the timeline is still realistic, in a way that keeps the project moving without damaging the relationships that the business depends on.

Accountability does not have to be uncomfortable. But it does have to exist. And in many growing businesses, ensuring it exists is one of the most valuable things an experienced outside hand can provide.

If you are running a project and finding that accountability is slipping, or if you are about to start one and want to make sure it does not, I am happy to talk through how the right support can help.

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support, from planning and coordination to delivery and benefits tracking.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

Making Change Work – A series discussing project management in growing businesses:

• Why SME Projects Stall – and the Fix
• The urge to do: why projects in growing businesses skip the step that matters most 
• Who’s actually responsible? Project accountability
• The most expensive part of a project is the bit nobody plans for
• The hidden cost of the project that never quite moves

In my last piece, I wrote about the missing keystone in change projects: the coordination layer that so often determines whether a programme moves or quietly drifts. Today I want to go one step further back, to the moment before any of that coordination begins.

Because in many cases, the real problem starts even earlier.

The pull towards doing

There is a particular kind of pressure that exists in smaller businesses. It is the pressure to be seen to be moving.

When a decision gets made, a new system, a process change, a restructure, the instinct is to start immediately. To assign tasks, hold a kick-off, begin. Planning can feel like a delay. A luxury. Something larger organisations do because they have the time and the people, but not something a growing business needs to spend weeks on.

I understand that instinct. In fast-moving businesses, momentum matters, and stopping to plan can feel like losing it.

But in my experience, both in large-scale corporate programmes and in the work I do with growing businesses across Yorkshire, skipping the planning phase does not save time. It borrows it, at a very high rate of interest.

What planning actually means

When I was working in Sales and Operations Planning at Morrisons, the entire discipline was built around one idea: before you commit to doing something, you need to understand what it will actually require.

Not in theory. In practice.

What are the resource implications? What does it cost, fully, not optimistically? Who is affected, and how? What has to stop, or slow down, in order for this to happen? What does success actually look like, and how will you know when you have reached it?

These are not complicated questions. But they are uncomfortable ones, because answering them honestly sometimes means adjusting the scope, the timeline, or the ambition of a project before it has even begun.

In large organisations, there are people whose job it is to ask these questions. Project managers, finance business partners, operational planners. They slow things down deliberately, because they know what happens when those questions do not get asked.

In most growing businesses, nobody has that role. And so the questions do not get asked, or they get answered quickly and optimistically, in a meeting where everyone is already committed to the idea.

The compounding cost of under-planning

The consequences show up later, and they compound.

A project scoped without proper resource planning runs out of capacity halfway through. A budget set without understanding the full cost of change gets exceeded before the hard work has even started. A timeline built without accounting for business-as-usual pressures slips, then slips again, until the original deadline becomes a source of embarrassment rather than a milestone.

And because the planning was not done at the start, each of these problems has to be solved in real time, under pressure, by people who are already stretched.

The project that was supposed to reduce the load on the leadership team ends up adding to it.

Why this happens more in smaller businesses

It would be easy to frame this as a discipline problem, as though business owners simply need to slow down and think more carefully. But that is not quite right.

The real driver is structural. In smaller businesses, fewer people are involved in any given decision, and roles are often less clearly defined. There is no one whose specific job is to challenge the plan before it becomes a commitment. The person who had the idea is often also the person leading the project, which makes it psychologically difficult to pump the brakes.

There is also a resource tension that is different from the corporate environment. In a large organisation, a planning phase has dedicated time and people attached to it. In a growing business, planning competes directly with the day-to-day work of running the business. It rarely wins that competition.

So projects begin underprepared, not through carelessness, but through a combination of pressure, structure, and the very real demands of keeping everything else moving at the same time.

What good planning looks like in a growing business

The answer is not to import a corporate planning process wholesale. That would be its own kind of mistake: too slow, too formal, and disconnected from the pace at which smaller businesses actually operate.

But there is a middle ground. A planning phase that is proportionate, practical, and focused on the questions that genuinely matter before work begins.

At minimum, that means being clear on scope: what is in this project, and what is deliberately out of it. It means understanding the resource picture honestly, who is doing what, alongside what else, and whether that is actually feasible. It means having a realistic view of cost that accounts for the indirect and hidden implications of change, not just the headline numbers. And it means agreeing what done looks like before anyone starts moving.

None of that requires a planning department. But it does require someone to hold the space for those conversations, and to keep holding it when the urge to just get on with it becomes hard to resist.

The value of an outside perspective

One of the things I find most useful when working with clients on change projects is simply being the person who asks the uncomfortable questions at the start.

Not to slow things down for the sake of it. But because I have seen enough projects, both at scale and in smaller businesses, to know which questions, left unanswered, tend to cause the most damage later.

An external perspective also helps with a problem that is surprisingly common in owner-led businesses: the difficulty of challenging your own assumptions when you are also the person most invested in the outcome.

Good planning is not pessimism. It is the work that makes everything that follows more likely to succeed.

Before the doing, the thinking

The urge to do is understandable. In growing businesses especially, action feels like progress, and planning can feel like its opposite.

But the projects I have seen succeed, at every scale and in every sector, share a common characteristic. Someone, at the beginning, made the time to ask the hard questions. To understand what the project would actually require. To make the plan before making the commitment.

That step does not guarantee success. But skipping it makes failure significantly more likely.

And the cost of going back to do the planning that was not done at the start, once a project is already in motion, already over budget, already behind, is always higher than doing it properly in the first place.

If you are approaching a change project and want to make sure the planning is solid before work begins, I am always happy to have that conversation.

Get Ahead’s team can support the full planning phase, from scoping and resource planning to cost modelling and stakeholder mapping, as well as the delivery that follows.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com